communityleadershipsummitfandomcom-20200213-history
Gamification in Communities
Session: Gamification in Communities Time Saturday at 3:00 PM, Session #7 Session Leader: Rich Sands of Black Duck Note taker: Andy Oram of O'Reilly Introductions and whether people are using gamification in communities now. TED reputation system: rolled out ability to add comments to their videos, called TEDCred. No attempt to set the tone, a few people assigned just to clean things up afterward. They attracted people who were inspired and positive-minded, but quickly taken over by a few bullies who just wanted to stand on a soapbox and who drove away everyone with a positive attitude after a few months. There was a rating system for comments, but the bullies took that over too. They would create multiple accounts to rate each other up and do other such things to dominate. Now there are a lot of checks in place, such as no thumbs-down ratings, you're limited in how many thumbs-ups you can give during a week, and you can't rate a comment from your own IP address. Two moderators and a volunteer team. Working on improving the management of the volunteer team. Changes have entirely fixed the system. Ubuntu accomplishment system: Jono liked giving people a sense of accomplishment through trophies, but many people thought it was really bad. Besides stopping abuse, it's important to focus on the right kinds of accomplishmnet. What do you value? Many people who are against gamification have seen some bad implementations and assume these systems can't work. In Ubuntu, tried a hall of fame that hurt the community because highlighting a few achievers made other contributors feel like they haven't been appreciated or can't do enough. If a leaderboard acknowledges the best contributor, it may demotivate the second best. Good for a competitive situation, but bad in a situation where you want people to cooperate and achieve some goal together. Good to know how to rise in the leaderboard, if that furthers the overall goals of the community. For communities, avoid one-on-one competition. Question: all participation is rewarded in a community in some way, even if just by a sense of accomplishment. So perhaps people comfortable with the old system feel threatened. Jono: more just a fear of the unknown. Some people want the only criterion for approval to be how the community views the quality, not to impose another system that requires special handling and that some people can play better than others. Easier to build a game if you can base it on objective standards. Harder to judge quality, how nice someone is, etc. Ohloh: people can rate the helpfulness of comments, and this works. Requires a fairly high number of ratings to be valid. Social aspect of games often forgotten now. People in the flow are more open to suggestions. Relationships are also important, so if people like each other and see the right people getting rewards, the game could help build community. But if it undermines relationships, it could hurt. One advantage of a good game is it gives people agency (a forum where they can do things that matter to them). In contrast, giving a reward doesn't address the sense of empowerment. There's a difference between acknowledging a contribution and creating an incentive. Measurements are acknowledgements. Competition can be part of a social connection. You may target someone to beat on the metrics, but feel respect for them. Everybody cares about where they stand in a community. Key is to make it fair. People treat real life as a game whether or not there are formal metrics. For instance, in political systems, people know not to take positions that would cause powerful people to make life difficult. Gamification provides guidelines for getting the status that people would otherwise get in illegitimate ways. Make sure new people get a chance; cumulative achievements shouldn't put old-timers too far ahead. Perhaps restart a timer every week or two. Open source code communities have built-in rules for advancing. They're different for each project, but don't need gamification. Rewards may be useful for tasks that nobody likes to do naturally, such as reviewing patches. Communities need to highlight members who have historically been very helpful: old-timers recognize and respect them when they speak, but newbies don't understand their history. Have a shared ownership of the journey they're taking. Lots of experiments a couple decades ago to determine the most productive programmers. Whatever was measured became a pathological incentive. Ohloh: people know statistics about the value of a codebase are unrealistic, but still like them because they can interpret them in ways that are useful to them. Suggestions: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/ http://www.scvngr.com/ http://www.meetup.com/Portland-Games-for-Change/